I was talking to 
What I believe is happening is that there is just so much content out there now that it is not only difficult to create something even slightly unique, but also unnecessary. With so much content to choose from, it is possible to watch a lot and get the feeling that it is "new" even though it is all very much familiar. After all, they have different names and actors - they must be different.
It is not that there is nothing of quality out there, but there really isn't very much, which I think is driven by the way we consume through the streaming services too. They are able to have one or two okay shows and then, fill the rest with crap that no one really wants or needs to watch. Even though I don't even watch that much, I still find myself flicking through Netflix, Prime, HBO and Apple like I would have channel-surfed in the past, because there is nothing interesting to watch.
And that is perhaps one of the larger reasons too, where because there is so much choice, the value of all of it has been depreciated and there is nothing that anyone is really invested into for a long period of time. Regardless of what you actually think of the show, there isn't the "Friends" culture now, where people will religiously invest themselves into the show, the characters and their private lives for the decade whilst the show is going, and another two decades since.
It is all about quantity now, pushing out the next version of content, knowing that it has no logs, no longevity, and once people have consumed it once, it is going to get dropped on the content trash pile, never to be consumed again. It gets relegated to more filler to give an impression that there is choice, even though no one is actually going to watch it. It is like going into an ice cream store with a hundred choices, with Strawberry, Chocolate and caramel, spread amongst bean, chicken and dogshit flavors.
And then there is the other cultural change where people are watching short-form content from the likes of YouTube, of random crap pushed into a couple minutes, where there is the feedback "high from completion" every few minutes, to the point that people are no longer able to invest themselves into anything that is going to take up too much time. A two hour movie is a large investment, but 100 pieces of content spread across five hours seems the better deal. And, with the quality of the movies these days, that investment into watching a movie is limited at best.
The other aspect is that a lot of the social side of watching shows has been taken out of the watching, with less people in relationships and more spread across content, so there are fewer people to discuss a particular show with. Yes, there are plenty of online forums etcetera that produce content to read and watch, but it is largely a solo endeavor, not a personal conversation between two people who have a real-world relationship together.
Content consumption has largely become a process of social isolation, where the consumption happens from the comfort of the own home, but devoid of friends and even family. Rather than the stories that used to bring us together, they are vignettes broadcast to keep us apart, keep us disconnected from each other, but feeling like we are doing something of value with our time.
I have talked with many of my friends over the years about this and whilst many disagree as they sit down and watch with their partners, over those years, they are discovering that despite "watching together" they don't actually spend any time discussing what they have watched. It is like a ritual at the end of the day where they sit next to each other until the show finishes, brush their teeth and head to bed. It isn't a shared experience at all - it is not far different to two strangers sitting near each other in the cinema and then going their separate ways at the end of the movie.
I think that one of the challenges we face is that as a whole, we ourselves have become less creative as a society, relying on specialized others to do pretty much everything for us. Because we have become consumptive rather than creative, it is increasingly hard for us to actually analyze what we consume, because we don't have enough personal experience to do so. Yes, we are able to judge "good or bad" on how we feel about it, but even that is largely driven by what we are told to feel through the very act of consumption, where the various media primes us for the experience, nudging our opinion through the idea that "people like us" have also liked it.
People like us.
How do we know it is people "like us" if we spend so little time actually interacting with a range of people, like us, or otherwise? In the end, all we are doing is consuming what we have been suggested blindly, under the proviso that it has been "specially chosen" for us, without realizing that the algorithms are herding everyone into the same direction, because that makes it far easier and cheaper to produce the content that is going to be shoveled down our throats. Then, what we produce is based on what we have eaten, creating a circle of content creation, driven by the shovel, not the consumer.
But, since there is always something more created to distract us from actually thinking about what we are doing and why, we don't have to spend time thinking about this at all - we can just pack the void with more filler content - wishing for something meaningful to happen in our lives.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
